Topic ID #7022 - posted 2/19/2010 6:01 PM
Jennifer Palmer
Webmaster
Turkeys domesticated not once, but twice
Jennifer Palmer
Webmaster
New research indicates that the birds were tamed in Mesoamerica and what is now the Southwestern United States, with the poultry we eat today descending from the former region.
February 03, 2010|By Thomas H. Maugh II
Turkeys, the only domesticated animals from the New World that are now used globally, were actually domesticated twice -- once in Mesoamerica as was previously believed and once in what is now the southwestern United States.
The new findings, reported this week by Canadian and American researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from a DNA analysis of ancient turkey bones and coprolites, the polite name for fossilized excrement.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that both strains of domesticated turkeys are now extinct, replaced by more highly inbred strains. The turkeys we eat today, moreover, are not descendants of the North American turkeys, but of those from Mesoamerica, which in a convoluted journey were taken to Europe by Spanish explorers, then reexported to North America.
The findings "have really helped to clarify some of the questions archaeologists have been wondering about for a long time," said archaeologist Jonathan C. Driver of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, who was not involved in the research. It shows that the wild turkeys in the Southwest and Mesoamerica now "have nothing to do with the domestic turkey, that they are neither ancestor nor descendant."
It also shows that there was only one breed of turkey in the Southwest, "that it was traded quite widely, and that its breeding was carefully controlled," he said.
Read the rest of the article here.
February 03, 2010|By Thomas H. Maugh II
Turkeys, the only domesticated animals from the New World that are now used globally, were actually domesticated twice -- once in Mesoamerica as was previously believed and once in what is now the southwestern United States.
The new findings, reported this week by Canadian and American researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from a DNA analysis of ancient turkey bones and coprolites, the polite name for fossilized excrement.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that both strains of domesticated turkeys are now extinct, replaced by more highly inbred strains. The turkeys we eat today, moreover, are not descendants of the North American turkeys, but of those from Mesoamerica, which in a convoluted journey were taken to Europe by Spanish explorers, then reexported to North America.
The findings "have really helped to clarify some of the questions archaeologists have been wondering about for a long time," said archaeologist Jonathan C. Driver of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, who was not involved in the research. It shows that the wild turkeys in the Southwest and Mesoamerica now "have nothing to do with the domestic turkey, that they are neither ancestor nor descendant."
It also shows that there was only one breed of turkey in the Southwest, "that it was traded quite widely, and that its breeding was carefully controlled," he said.
Read the rest of the article here.
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